Lone Moon
by The Erudite
Summary: Amid the darkness, there remains a sole constant: a lone, shimmering moon. Neither benevolent nor malevolent, it nonetheless casts its pale reflection down on all those beneath it, perhaps as a reminder of some inescapable truth. [Oneshot. Rated T for violence, mild language.]


He closed his eyes. They stung. Everything stung anymore. Life was little more than a fleeting ribbon of black and pink skies, and of pains everywhere. When he walked, his legs ached. When he stood still, his face burned. When he touched his face, his hands shook. He'd been glaring at the sun, and it had glared back. He wanted it to answer the question he didn't realize he was asking, but, of course, it couldn't. Such a cold sun he'd never seen in all his life.

Sometime within the hours of marching, the armor rattling, the blood cracking off his face, that cold sun had shriveled from his sight. The moon was too frightened of him to appear. He didn't need any more haunting glows that night, anyway. When his legs were fit to buckle beneath him again, he fell to his knees. He worked his legs into a seated position, and his neck loosened his head up to the sky again. He didn't sleep. He never slept. The cold of night sweeping over him coated his eyes with dew as it did the grass, and, suddenly, the icy sting of sunshine reminded him that it was time to move again. The hours in between were no comfort, but at least he stopped thinking for a while.

The thinking was the worst part. While he walked, the puppets in his head took to their unending stage every hour. A matinee of horror. They pranced about on stage, dancing and singing to one another gaily about the days past and the days to come. And the audience would laugh and cheer as those puppets' soulless gazes fixed on him. He'd learned all the actors' names from having to watch these shows on repeat. He already knew them, but he learned them all again. Learned their new faces. The worst was the one they called "Father." He was a terrific actor, a handsome fellow, and a sharp wit. How they loathed each other. Father would twirl for the crowd and smile, like a proper showman. And then the lights would dim, and the audience would crawl onto the stage and butcher him, ripping him to chunks of flesh. Every day, without fail. At first, he screamed for Father to move, to leave the stage, to stop performing and pay attention. But he just twirled and smiled. And then he died. And the show would start again.

But there were other actors. Father was just the one he hated the most. There was another called Dedue that he also despised. Dedue smiled at him and told him how wonderfully he'd done. Dedue was goodhearted, earnest, and steady. Dedue was an idiot. Dedue was killed for nothing.

When the showings were over, Dedue and Father and all the others would crawl toward him, pleading with their broken outstretched hands and worm-fed eyes. They called him by his name. They shouted it out in voices that warped into the sweeping wind. Their moans of agony filled his ears and rattled around the stage, around his skull, and out his eyes, into his teeth, down his throat. And the noise stopped for a little while. And the sun stung him in the eyes again.

He'd paid no heed to how long he'd been going, of course. There was no "then" or "now." Sometimes there was a "here" or "there," but never a "then." He was conscious of approaching a "there." A "there" where the sun stopped shining. That was somewhere the plays might stop. How wonderful, if he could find such reprieve. It was the only thought that filled his heart. That, and one other hot, rushing sensation. He hadn't felt that latter sensation in a few "theres." That heat was a cold comfort, and he knew it, but the cold burned so delightfully. So much better than that cold sun.

In the midst of one of his plays, he realized the set had changed. There was a mound of gray on a backdrop he'd never noticed before. It was a smoldering heap of gray, and badly shaped. The artist for that backdrop would have to be killed, too. But he loved the ugly, smoldering gray. It was the most beautiful part of the set he'd ever seen. He wondered how he'd failed to notice it before. It was such a charming and sprightly hideous lump. He longed to stretch his arms out and embrace the whole thing.

He fixated on that lovely, disgusting mound for all of the shows. For once, he paid no mind to the actors as they were reduced to puddles. He was so moved by that sweet, precious pile of filth. When he stopped thinking again, his last thought was of the gray. He wanted to be close to the gray. The gray was so intoxicating.

And when he started thinking again, it wasn't the sun stabbing into his eyes, it was a hand prodding at him. A hand. Not a puppet. No, puppets felt entirely different. Their horrid little mitts reached into his brain and tugged at his eyes and scratched their nails on the back of his teeth. No, this was a hand—not his—touching his body. He looked at the hand. It was marvelous to disregard the play for a moment. Glazed from disuse, he had to blink his eyes several times to ensure he could see through them. Verily, there was a hand on him. He looked up at the hand's owner. It was a boy. Clad head-to-toe in armor that shined, reflecting the cold daylight. A boy. Not a man. His face was soft, and a bit pink. Like ceramic.

The boy kept poking at him as he looked back. The boy's eyes were small. His hands quivered as he ran them over the body in front of him. And the boy wore wine-colored vestments. Yes, that was the feeling he was getting. He rose to his feet, and the boy stepped back. The boy drew a weapon from his side and pointed it.

He stuck a hand out and wrapped it around the boy's neck. The tension in his hand was therapeutic. They both shook in a rhythm that made him feel like he was holding still. He squeezed, and transferred the stillness. The boy would never know how lucky he was. Elation shook through his body when it happened. He laughed quite loudly. The sound of his own laughter rattled around in his head like the puppets' voices, but it only made him gladder.

Soon, there were more sets of armor around him. More red. More of what he wanted. He shouted something at the armor. He had no idea what. The madness that sometimes frothed from his mouth was of little interest to him. There came that beautiful feeling again. The ring of metal striking metal. The awful vibration as force shattered a bone. The bittersweet taste of iron in his nose. He kept shouting and laughing, as it was the only way he could release his jubilation. The joy that accumulated in his head, not having to watch the puppets, he let it all out for them. He let it all out into the suits of armor, and grinned gleefully as he saw himself in their falling helmets. That was him.

But the joy didn't get to last. Such is the way of things. How could such rapture go on forever? He found he wasn't seeing himself anymore. In fact, it had suddenly become marginally more difficult to see. A blackness encroached on his vision. The puppets, he thought. Damn them. They had come to ruin his joy. He had finally freed himself of them, but only long enough for them to claw their way back into his eyes and drag him back with their fetid, decomposed fingers.

And his face was hot. It was so hot. It burned. It seared. Dammit, it burned! A pot of boiling water rolled down his face. It scalded him so much, all he could do was cry out. Instinctively, his hand went to the burn on his face. He clawed at it, digging feverishly at the flesh to make the burning stop. And something came out. He seized it so hard that it immediately snapped in two in his grasp. Shards of wood shaped into a slim shaft fell at his feet. His face still burned, but he felt some satisfaction at seeing that pile of wood. He took a few steps forward, and found one last suit of armor. He was so grateful, he forgot the burning on his face for a little longer. He felt a few more moments of rapture, and it was gone again.

When he started thinking again, he was at that awful, miserable, sweet pile of gray. The sun didn't shine on him when he walked inside it, and for that, he felt terribly grateful. His legs were already unusually weak when he approached the structure. He walked inside and slowly collapsed to the ground on the freezing stone. It was the greatest feeling he'd ever known. This was the "there" he'd been seeking. He crawled toward a wall. Slowly, he managed to return to his sitting position, and propped his back up against the wall. He touched his face. The burn was still there, but it had lessened. His skin cracked every time he breathed, or his pulse throbbed through his cheeks.

His hands touched the ground, and they were no longer quivering. The hard stone reassured him. Its blatant indifference was the sweetest rejoinder.

The sweetest except for…

Well, that was gone now.

Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd raised his hand to his eye again, feeling the muscles in the bleeding hole twitch. He would have to do something about that. Still, the pain was almost refreshing. He breathed in for the first time. The cool air of night surrounded him. Amber pierced the cracks of the walls around him. He looked up to confirm it: indeed, he was in Garreg Mach Monastery. He hadn't the faintest idea how he'd gotten there. How far had he traveled? How long had he been gone? None of it mattered. But there must have been a reason he was pulled here. Something within him knew this was where he should be. Among the ruins of his past, he could also choose to be dead and buried. And maybe that would keep the voices out of his head for once.

Father sat on his left side, Dedue on his right. He nodded, tired. It would never be over.

But if he was here, nobody would care. Maybe if no more bodies approached him, he'd no longer hear those cries beseeching him to take their heads. Maybe he could let the eons pass around him without doing anything any longer, and it would all be like those blissful moments when he stopped thinking.

But he couldn't die. No, then he'd just be stuck with them forever. And their wailing would never cease. And their sorrow would burrow into his eternal soul. His damnation would be assured. So he resolved to stay in this "here" until they'd had enough of tormenting him. He would subsist however he needed to for that long.

The room kept filling up as he thought. So he determined it was best if he stopped that. He listened quietly to the sounds of the wind slipping between the bricks of the destroyed monastery. Instead of his usual litany of plays, his mind was occupied by a stage full of new actors. New in a relative sense, at least. These ones sat alongside him, trained with him, and ate meals with him. Most called him "Your Highness." One called him "Boar Prince." And just one consistently called him "Dimitri." That one, that last one, was only a vague, fragmentary memory. Some indefinable pile of dust that had somehow managed to settle itself upon his brain and create the fantasy of a time that never was.

And as he closed his eye, he realized he loved that inscrutable gray lie.


End file.
